FOUNDATIONS OF INDIVIDUALITY AND PERSONALITY IN HERDER
Herder as philosopher was concerned more with practical and concrete
applications of his principles than with dogmas and abstract theories.
The following brief investigation of purely philosophical discussions is
made with a view of determining how he applies his philosophy to this
definite anthropological conception.
In his _Gespräche über Spinozas System_ Herder sets forth much of his own
religious philosophy. A passage in the second dialogue substitutes for
the word “attributes” the word “forces” in expounding one of Spinoza’s
postulates. The passage then reads: “The Godhead reveals itself in an
infinite number of forces and in an infinite number of ways.” It is with
the word for forces that we are concerned at this point—_Kraft_, _Kräfte_.
This same word Herder uses in discussing the fundamental life-principle
in the world at large, which is the theme of his first few sections in
the essay entitled: _Vom Erkennen und Empfinden in ihrem menschlichen
Ursprunge und den Gesetzen ihrer Würkung_. These _Kräfte_, these
“modifications of God,” find their impulse to operate in a stimulus,
beyond the material form of which Herder cannot go.
Herder’s philosophy plants itself from the beginning quite firmly on
material foundations. He says that in the qualities which are constantly
designated by such words as heavy, thrust, fall, movement, rest,
strength, even power of inertia, is implied a life-principle, a soul.
Any close observation of nature must show that the great working power
of nature is everywhere the same, and it is the analogy between the
processes of the material world in general and the phenomena in the human
organism in particular which can give the clearest insight into the great
life-principle. This study by analogous reasoning is not artificial, Man
cannot avoid feeling the similarity between himself and external nature.
Human beings must of necessity, he continues, vitalize everything about
them with their own feelings.
The feelings then are strongly instrumental in man’s interpretation of
the world about him.
I. STIMULUS
The first phase of feeling which Herder considers is _Reiz_ or stimulus.
The peculiar phenomenon of stimulus says he, which may be seen in the
smallest, most delicate filaments of plants, causing them to contract and
expand, and bespeaking a sort of feeling is due to the same law which
controls the most complicated feelings and passions of the human being.
This all-pervading law of stimulus Herder finds in the action of physical
heat and cold, which he makes parallel in its working with pleasure and
pain respectively. Pain, disturbance by something foreign, contracts; the
strength collects, increases for resistance, and takes its stand again.
Well-being and pleasure—warmth—expands, makes for calmness, placidity,
enjoyment, and release.
That which is expansion and contraction in dead nature, the result of
warmth and cold, seems to be here the obscure seed of stimulus and
feeling in man. The “world-all,” the entire feeling, nature of human
beings and animals moves in this ebb and flood of warmth and cold. The
power to expand and contract which is the effect of this heat and cold,
pleasure and pain, Herder makes the fundamental principle of the power
for self-nutriment.
This power is nothing external or mechanical, in which case it would
not be life. The plant structure of organic fibers which takes in life
from the surrounding elements does so through its own activities. The
power to escape its enemies and to make over all its nourishment into
differentiated parts lies within the plant. The complicated body of the
animal likewise has this stimulus to seek the nutrition essential for
life within: hunger and thirst are powerful exciting forces. When he
applies his theories to man, he calls love the most powerful stimulus to
life.
Herder ascribes to the plant something in addition to the stimulus to
seek nutrition when he recognizes that intelligence in plant structures
which selects only such elements as fit the peculiar needs for its
development after its kind. He does not succeed in getting rid entirely
of the external in operating the organism; he sees in breathing a kind
of time-beating by which nature swings the machine, and here nature is
without, for she breathes upon the machine, in this harmonious way, the
spirit of life.
Thus far Herder has recognized the existence of a stimulus in the
vegetable and animal kingdoms, which is in reality a life-principle. This
life-principle is not only the monitor over the feelings, but merges into
them and becomes the stuff of which feelings are made.
What is the relation of these indefinable and unanalyzed stimuli to the
feelings? Since the passions which surround the heart find their roots in
the finest fibers of the physical structure, the degree to which these
fibers are stimulated determines the degree to which the feelings will be
excited and will express themselves. Love, courage, anger, and bravery
are in proportion to the stimulus of the heart and the collaborating
parts: “Die Innigkeit, Tiefe und Ausbreitung mit der wir Leidenschaften
empfangen, verarbeiten und fortpflanzen macht uns zu den flachen oder
tiefen Gefässen die wir sind.”
The forcefulness of thought is likewise dependent upon the vigor of this
obscure stimulus, for no thought, says he, can reach the brain unless
feeling in its proper physical connection has preceded it.
And just here our philosopher lays the very roots of individuality.
The degree to which the fibers are stimulated is the beginning of the
operations which will end in producing an aggregate of properties
peculiar to an individual.
II. SENSES
By this inductive method, which develops fundamentally a philosophy of
evolution, Herder finds that the senses are a nerve-structure developed
to meet the waves of stimulus from without and feeling from within and to
differentiate them more finely than did the fibers which worked only in a
general way. But the law is the same. The nerves of every sense operate
according to the same law by which the fibers contract and expand. The
nerves advance to meet pleasant agreeable things, but recede from and
resist unpleasant things.
Now Herder observes that something other than the organ of sense and the
external objects must operate to produce sensation in at least two of the
senses. He sees a certain mental bond without which sight and hearing
could not go to the object nor the object to the senses; this common
substance, he says, is light, a substance which has the peculiarity of
taking just so much from creation as the two end organs can receive. But
this light as a medium is a requisite for the finer senses only. There
are coarser senses, fibers, and stimuli which cannot be brought into
action thus. They can feel only in themselves, for the object must come
to them, touch them, and, to a certain extent, be one with them.
Herder is explicit in connecting individual character with the senses.
The contribution which each sense makes to the soul cannot with any two
human beings be the same in kind, strength, depth, and breadth. There
are many proofs of this. Seeing and hearing, which furnish most of
the material for thinking, are seldom in one individual with the same
degree of training or of natural force. This will not only account for
inequalities of the senses evinced in all forms of expression in a single
individual, but for such inequalities among groups and races. For, he
continues, imaginative power in which thoughts and feelings disport
themselves is made of the flowing together of sense impressions.
This is Plato’s thought also when he objects to making knowledge mere
sense-perception because it would make a different standard of knowledge
for each man. Socrates in _Theaetetus_ quotes Protagoras on the same
point: “Sensations are relative and individual.” One scarcely needs to be
reminded here of Herder’s thorough acquaintance with Greek philosophy.
The way from a sensation to thought is through the nerve-structure of
sense organs, these nerve-structures furnishing just such a medium
between the object of sensation on the one hand and thinking and willing
on the other, as does light between the object of sense and the visual
and auditory organs.
Never losing sight of the physiological element in his psychology, Herder
tells us that the soul has grown out of the body, and has so outgrown the
body that soul has become the monarch over that, without which soul could
not exist. All its thinking grows out of feeling, and this feeling out of
a body having in its command manifold obscure forces administered to by
variously endowed “servants” and “messengers.”
III. KNOWING AND WILLING
Herder denies that anything in the way of knowledge comes back to the
soul out of the platonic fore-world, and abstract egoism, he says, is
opposed to truth and the open course of nature. Just as all of the soul’s
knowing depends upon obscure stimuli and forces having their foundations
in the body and leading to sensations and then to reasoning, so her
willing comes from these as a natural sequence of her knowing. Any
knowing without willing would be false and incomplete. If knowing is only
a deep feeling of truth, who is going to see truth and at the same time
be blind to it—know goodness and not will to do it? Every single passion
or feeling thus knowing the good would at the same time will the good.
Herder is emphatic about the interdependence of these two. Just as no
knowing is without willing, no willing is without knowing; they are only
one energy of the soul.
This suggests Socrates in the _Protagoras_, as he argues that men would
always do good if they knew the good. “No man voluntarily pursues evil
or that which he thinks to be evil. To prefer evil to good is not in
human nature.”
Briefly summarizing: Herder finds his _stimulus_ the same everywhere
in the material world. It is the principle of life since it impels
to self-nutriment and reproduction. It works by the same law in
both body and soul. Variations of it in degree are the foundations
for individuality and personality. All that is true of feeling for
essentially stimulus becomes feeling. Out of all this Herder arrives
at the conclusion: “Der tiefste Grund unseres Daseyns ist individuell,
sowohl in Empfindungen als Gedanken.”
The distinctive personal and individual character whose foundations have
just been traced, according to our author, can not come to its fullest
development except as a component part in a larger self-conscious and
self-directing entity which he calls “humanity.”
This humanity as a whole, and the relation of the individual to it, is
discussed in the collections _Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität_. An
emphatic tone regarding personality and individuality as characteristics
of the group pervades these letters.
Existence as a self-conscious being which develops into group
consciousness Herder finds rooted in human frailty.
Primitive man, to himself and enigma, he observes, when comparing his
visible condition, his natural capacities, his will-power with enduring
nature, was forced to a feeling of weakness, to a sense of mortal
existence; he finds himself of the earth, a fragile house of clay.
Sympathy then and the realization of one’s duty to one’s fellow-men began
here.
But the consciousness of frailty led also to a knowledge of our powers
and abilities, to a sense of our calling and our duties, and brought us
to a deep consideration of human nature.
The group is always striving toward an ideal pattern which is “the
character of the race,” and, again, this character is in the individual;
for, says Herder, he who does not make the best of himself cannot assist
the sum total of the race.
The author states the idea when he says that it is according to the
sacred laws of nature that man is a complete unit in himself, and at the
same time an important element of groups each a consistent part of larger
groups which make the sum total of humanity. Man is friend, citizen,
husband, father; fellow-citizen, finally, in the great city of God on
earth.